In the race to automate sales, most of the hype has centered on replacement: “AI BDRs” that promise to cut headcount by letting agents prospect, email, and book meetings with little human input. But many sales leaders are learning the same lesson the hard way. When automation gets pushed too far, quality drops. Inboxes fill with generic spam. Calendars clog with low-intent meetings and no-shows. And the cleanup work lands right back on managers and reps, triaging threads, fixing CRM data, and undoing the damage.
Now a new startup named Jeeva AI is betting that the winning model isn’t replacing sales reps, it’s supercharging them.
Today, Jeeva is announcing $9 million in funding led by JLL Spark, the strategic investment arm of commercial real estate giant JLL. The round includes Sapphire Ventures, Alt Capital, Launch Capital, GTMFund, Nonstop Capital, Coyote Capital, Bonfire Ventures, Techstars, Marc Benioff, and Mucker Capital.
The pitch is straightforward: Jeeva provides an agentic sales platform designed to “supercharge reps instead of replacing them,” automating administrative work and repeatable workflows while keeping humans in charge of the customer relationship.
The problem: “AI BDRs” that create more work than they remove
In theory, the AI BDR category is an easy sell. Hiring and ramping junior reps is expensive, outbound is noisy, and sales teams spend a shocking amount of time on tasks that don’t directly move deals forward: researching accounts, enriching leads, writing follow-ups, logging notes, and maintaining a clean CRM.
In practice, a lot of “autonomous outreach” tools have struggled with the basics. Sales leaders complain that the output is inconsistent, messaging misses context, and the review burden becomes its own full-time job. Buyers get flooded with emails that feel automated. Reps field confused replies. And managers end up policing the process rather than coaching the team.
Companies like Artisan, 11x, and 6Sense, have made waves by claiming to completely replace sales reps with “AI workers” but have largely disappointed.
Jeeva’s positioning is built around that backlash: the company argues that agentic systems should reduce busywork without removing human judgment. Automation, in this framing, is something you deploy to support reps, not to impersonate them.
Jeeva’s bet: agentic workflows with human oversight
Jeeva says its platform covers the end-to-end workflow around a rep’s day: discovery, outreach, coaching, meeting notes, and CRM management. The company claims setup takes about 10 minutes and that customers see up to three hours per day in time savings.
“Humans should always be at the center of the sales process,” said Jeeva founder and CEO Gaurav Bhattacharya. “Instead of trying to replace them, we want to supercharge them with an arsenal of agentic tools.”
Jeeva highlights five main feature areas:
- Finding and enriching leads: research across 50+ data sources, plus internet crawling to match ideal customer profiles
- Personalized outreach and follow-up: sourcing contacts, drafting and proofreading messages, and managing reminders
- Meeting notes, tips, and coaching: capturing notes, surfacing next steps, and recommending actions
- CRM management: reducing the time spent on logging, updating, and cleaning records
- Universal integrations: deployment across common email, calendar, CRM, and productivity tools in minutes
The practical goal: let reps spend more time on calls and relationship-building, and less time acting as their own coordinator, researcher, and data-entry clerk.
Why JLL Spark led the round
It’s not hard to see why a real estate-focused strategic investor would lean into this thesis. Commercial real estate brokers and deal teams live in a high-velocity world of relationship management, constant follow-up, and fragmented information. They’re heavy users of email and calendar, and they’re often stuck juggling outdated systems, manual research, and a CRM that’s only as good as the time someone spends updating it.
“Jeeva’s platform has been a game changer for our client facing teams across leasing, capital markets and advisory,” said Ajey Kaushal, Principal at JLL Spark. “By removing administrative busywork and adding intelligent AI workflows with human oversight, our deal teams can spend more time with clients and are seeing up to 10x gains in productivity without sacrificing service quality.”
That “human oversight” line matters. In regulated or reputation-sensitive industries, real estate, healthcare, financial services, the risk of automation isn’t just lower conversion rates. It’s brand damage. When messages feel spammy or inaccurate, the cost can show up in lost trust, not just lost pipeline.
The wedge: the “non-tech economy” and underserved verticals
Jeeva says it already serves 35,000 users and more than 300 enterprise customers, naming JLL, Whisper Energy, Initio Capital, and Deaglo. Unlike many sales-tech startups that start with SaaS-first teams, Jeeva is leaning into what it calls the “non-tech economy”, industries like real estate, healthcare, financial services, legal, and professional services.
That focus is strategic. These sectors are large, relationship-driven, and often behind on modern sales tooling. Many teams still run on a messy mix of inbox rules, spreadsheets, and manual follow-up rituals. The promise of saving even one or two hours per rep per day becomes meaningful quickly, especially in high-compensation roles.
“We are excited about Jeeva’s focus on underserved industries like real estate, healthcare, legal, financial, and professional services, where sellers have had limited access to modern sales technology,” said Aditya Reddy, Vice President at Sapphire Ventures. “Jeeva helps these businesses multiply go to market productivity, grow efficiently and scale high impact services across the non tech economy.”
The subtext: if AI is going to reshape sales, it won’t just be in software. It will be in every relationship-based industry where time, responsiveness, and follow-through decide who wins.
A founder story built for this moment
Bhattacharya’s background fits the kind of narrative that plays well in venture-backed enterprise: resilience plus repeatability. Jeeva says he grew up in poverty in India, founded a healthtech company that was acquired, moved to the U.S., and is now a three-time founder and a Forbes 30 Under 30 awardee. The company also emphasizes its team across the U.S. and India, positioning itself as both technically deep and execution-oriented.
That matters because Jeeva isn’t pitching a single feature. It’s pitching a platform, one that needs to integrate broadly, handle sensitive workflows, and maintain quality at scale.
The bigger question: what “agentic” really means in sales
The word “agentic” is everywhere right now, and it can mean anything from “autofills a field” to “runs an entire process end-to-end.” Sales is where the gap between marketing and reality shows up fastest, because the output is customer-facing.
Jeeva’s approach is essentially a boundary-setting exercise: automate the parts that waste time, keep the human in the driver’s seat for the parts that require taste, judgment, and relationship awareness. If that model works, it may be the more durable path, especially as buyers get better at spotting automation and less tolerant of low-effort outreach.
What’s next for Jeeva
Jeeva says its product is available today with a free plan and self-serve onboarding. The funding gives it room to expand product development, deepen integrations, and compete in a crowded market where incumbents and startups are all racing to claim “AI-powered sales.”
In an era where sales teams are drowning in tools that promise scale, Jeeva’s pitch is that scale only matters if it doesn’t break trust, and that the best sales motion still has a person at the center of it. Companies can learn more at https://jeeva.ai.
